When we talk about energy poverty, we often talk about the price of electricity, natural gas, propane, oil or firewood.

Those prices matter.

But our new Energy Poverty Brief points to something bigger:

And if you’d rather hear the conversation than read all those numbers, Francesca Dobbyn, Executive Director of United Way Bruce Grey, will be on CFOS Open Line at 9 a.m. Friday, September 11, talking about what we found and what it means for households in our community.

For many households, the problem is not just the price of energy. It is having enough income to pay for all the basics.

We looked at data from the Ontario Energy Board, local electricity data from Westario Power, and what we are seeing through United Way Bruce Grey’s own Utility Assistance Program.

Together, they tell an important story.

More households are falling behind

Across Ontario, the number of residential electricity accounts grew by only 4% between 2019 and 2023.

But the amount of money households owed in electricity arrears grew by 119%.

We see the pressure locally too.

In Westario Power’s service area, the number of residential accounts grew by about 4%, while the number of accounts in arrears increased by 60%.

That tells us something important.

The number of customers is not growing nearly as quickly as the number of customers struggling to keep their accounts current.

Then we meet the household behind the bill

The Ontario Energy Board data can tell us about electricity accounts, arrears and disconnections.

Our Utility Assistance Program lets us see another part of the picture: the household trying to pay the bill.

In 2025–26, United Way Bruce Grey helped:

299 households 592+ people with $172,116 in direct utility grants.

For households where we have income information, the

average annual household income was just $28,368.

That income has to pay for much more than energy.

It also has to cover rent or mortgage payments, groceries, transportation, medication, clothing, phone bills and everything else a household needs.

There is only so much money to stretch.

In rural communities, heat doesn’t always come through a utility line

There is another important part of the story in Bruce Grey.

Many households heat their homes with wood, propane or furnace oil.

Provincial programs provide assistance with regulated electricity and natural gas costs. But those programs do not cover every way people heat their homes.

That is where locally raised United Way dollars become especially important.

In 2025–26:

70% of our local utility grant dollars purchased wood, propane and furnace oil.

For a household that heats with propane or furnace oil, keeping the heat on may mean finding the money for a large delivery all at once.

For someone heating with wood, our assistance can help purchase just part of the firewood they need for the heating season. A typical rural household may need $1,200 to $1,500 worth of wood to get through a winter, while our maximum grant is $700.

That means the grant can make an important difference, but it does not necessarily solve the problem for the whole winter. We often hear from households again in January when the wood purchased earlier in the season is running low.

And weather matters. The unusually cold spring of 2026 stretched the heating season and household fuel supplies even further.

Energy poverty looks different in a rural community.

More people can now qualify for provincial help

There has also been an important change to Ontario’s Low-income Energy Assistance Program (LEAP).

In 2024, the income limits were expanded so more households could qualify. The Ontario Energy Board also clarified that utilities must provide enough LEAP funding to assist all eligible applicants.

That makes comparing older LEAP numbers with newer ones complicated.

But there is an important point we don’t want to lose.

LEAP helps people who are already in arrears.

Raising the income limit did not create those unpaid bills. It allowed more households already struggling with electricity or natural gas arrears to qualify for help.

That tells us something about how far household income stretches today.

So, what did we learn?

There isn’t one cause of energy poverty.

The price of energy matters. The condition of a home matters. The kind of heating system matters. Weather matters. Individual household circumstances matter.

But when we put the provincial, local utility and United Way data together, one thing becomes very clear:

Income matters too.

A household cannot budget its way out of a budget that simply does not have enough money in it.

Emergency energy programs remain incredibly important. They can keep the electricity connected, put propane in a tank or get firewood stacked for winter.

But they respond after a household is already struggling.

If we want to understand why people are falling behind in the first place, we also need to talk about income, housing costs and the cost of all the other essentials competing for the same household dollars.

Want to dig into the numbers?

Our new Energy Poverty Brief brings all three sets of data together, including Ontario electricity arrears and LEAP data, Westario Power data, our local Utility Assistance Program results, and a closer look at housing affordability in Bruce Grey.

Download or read the report below